[WizzyWigg]

@meldrewreborn Totally agree with you on banking app.
Oh I regularly saw the bank manager when they existed. 😃 Difficult not to as she was my wife 😂.

[theunknowntech]

Just a heads up - this stuff might be considered "tampering" which may breach terms of service with your supplier.

It's also probably not a smart move anyway - fried customer anyone? Or perhaps a free burned down house? Because that's a risk you take if you faraday cage this stuff.

[meldrewreborn]

@theunknowntech

since nobody inspects our installations nowadays the suppliers wouldn’t know . They wouldn’t care either as their remit is only to install smart meters not to ensure that they actually work as designed. Any “cage” would have to allow for readings to be taken.

[wizzo227]

Bad idea, as the coded messages sent by those things might sneak through somehow, and boxing your meter under a tin-foil-hat or whatever radio-proof enclosure might be in the category of 'meter tampering' to evade winter fuel bills. Any volunteers to get nailed for a test case ? If it were boxed in permanently, it would get a meter reader sent and you'd pay eventually, so you'd gain nothing from jamming or boxing it. Hurling it into a cauldron of molten iron Terminator II style would work, but that is definitely meter tampering. I wonder who they'd send next to check up on your meter readings ?

My own bills policy is to open the meter cupboard and look at the 'import' number once a month and write it down on paper regardless of not needing to any more with all the marvels of new technology in my smetsII meter. I download variable prices twice a month (their half-hour price record annoyingly stops at less than a whole month) and download consumption.csv from which I select usually 1488 points per month of price p and quantity q of every half-hour interval. Then I compute a 1488 point pq sum 1st to 1st of the month of what my bill should be at the advertised price, and keep a cumulative total of what I think my bills should be to the 1st of every month, which I overlay on the same chart as cumulative totals of ii) what the electricity company think they have billed for to their somewhat irregular billing days and iii) cumulative total of what I've paid to that billing company (or been credited for special offers vouchers and price complications). I mostly ignore what they say I should be paying and compute a next £ payment which Must always keep the cumulative totals inside one month worth of electricity costs and preferably be closer than that. So, despite having a smetsII smart meter, I keep Their greedy fingers off the bottomless money pit of unattended user bills and I pay them what I ought to instead. Now for autumn I've put it up my payments to about £1 per day. Their billing calculations look fine, but their payment suggestions in the summer were way above what I use, so it was not a smart metering problem. By the way, my code to do 1488 pq sums runs in microseconds.

So, despite having a smart meter, I still watch my bills and waste as vigilently as ever and kept the directness of opening the cupboard once a month and looking at the meter number.